Chapter 8
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 8
Chapter Title: Blue Armband (2)
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HAO Corporation's 'Murim Gallery' was a community anyone could use if they knew how to access it.
That meant plenty of info posts about the martial world went up, but there were also tons of users treating the boards like personal diaries or worse, for malicious purposes. Some sickos even uploaded gross pics in the dead of night to gross out random strangers and get their kicks.
To stop excessive trolling from killing the community's vibe, HAO hired moderators. They paid them, naturally.
No one in their right mind would volunteer for ten hours a day of unpaid labor, glued to the gallery deleting nasty images.
The pay was just a smidge above minimum wage... and for me, it was nothing more than a short part-time stint before joining the guild.
Since it was a global community used by users worldwide, there were quite a few moderators called "blue armbands."
The hiring process included thorough background checks and NDAs, but the real issue was that the admin codes handed out to all these mods were ridiculously simple strings.
Three years from now, someone exploits that flaw in a massive hack, and the stock price of the 'HAO Network' running Murim Gallery tanks.
After that, they switched to random codes with extra verification steps, but as of right now, I'm the only one who knows how to become a mod in Murim's biggest community without official employment from HAO.
"This is why I regress."
I muttered to myself with a wry chuckle, created an ID for the gallery, and dove into the settings.
Enter code
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
"Q, 1, W, 2, E..."
I punched in the eight-digit code, and a blue icon popped up next to my nickname. Blue armband activation: success.
I immediately searched the boards for 'Return Bead'.
Even expanding to deleted posts visible only to mods, there were hardly any hits containing the keyword. The few that came up were typos or totally unrelated meanings.
I didn't give up, typing in words like 'Demon Cultist', 'Demonic Cult', 'regression', and so on.
[Sucking all seriousness]
If Terror Demon Emperor and Wind Duke duke it out one-on-one to the death, who wins?
Terror Demon Emperor's title is scary as hell from the get-go, but Wind Duke has this subtle vibe of being the strongest in the human realm...
Real talk, cuz Wind Duke's holed up on Baekdu Mountain scratching his belly, he looks weak? Still simping for Terror Demon Emperor who got ^smacked^ by the God of War—who was S-rank back then? Demon Cult grunts still out here?
Dawn troll spewing S-rank 'smack' lmaoooo, someone might think you're Wind Duke himself?
I'm a 7th-gen disciple of Wind Moon Sect. Our sect leader turns 130 in two days—he's digitally vulnerable elderly,,, he doesn't even know galleries like this exist, delete pronto plz...
7th-gen means elder batch lololol if you're a Wind Moon Sect elder, then I'm North American Seven Stars
Unlike before, an avalanche of posts flooded in. But the signal-to-noise ratio wasn't great—few had real substance.
It made sense.
Even in HAO Network's Murim Gallery, which was relatively lax on the down-low, demons were a topic most countries officially shied away from mentioning.
Except for the two pinnacle demons countable on one hand across history: Terror Demon Emperor (, Führer) and Iron Blood Divine Demon (, Ста́лин). Without them, you couldn't explain 20th-century modern history. Users of demonic arts were somewhat known, but...
Info on demonic arts themselves was controlled with shocking strictness.
By governments and the Murim Alliance, obsessed with preventing a second or third Terror Demon Emperor after those horrific two world wars.
The demonic path that once built empires of evil had crumbled into fringe cults or terror groups lurking in the shadows, but every now and then, a standout demon cultist would pop up.
And whenever that happened, bloody winds swept Murim. The Alliance's principle against the demonic path: unconditional extermination, annihilation, eradication.
Just ten years ago, a family hailed as one of the Ten Great Families—with prestige rivaling a nation's royalty—was wiped out root and stem for supposedly colluding with communists.
'One of my classmates was among them.'
Lion Princess Veronica. She lingered more vividly in my memory as the Blood Lion Demon Queen.
Shortly after the subjugation op—massive casualties notwithstanding—wrapped up as a success, Son Ha-rin came to see me.
Unlike me, barely scraping by on vagabond gigs after graduation, Ha-rin was the golden child carrying all of Murim's hopes. No—at that point, she was already a genius among geniuses, floated as a candidate for next Supreme Under Heaven Sword.
But she wasn't there for me personally.
I was just the guy who'd witnessed Level 1 Martial Public Enemy Blood Lion Demon Queen Veronica's final moments, having taken a spot in the Alliance-requested encirclement net.
I couldn't tell if the emotion Ha-rin felt facing me while asking about Veronica's end was resentment, or something else. Maybe nothing at all.
She's still tough to read even now, but back then... she really seemed like a creature devoid of emotion.
One thing I gleaned from that talk: Veronica had occupied a huge chunk of Ha-rin's childhood.
'Though now she just seems indifferent.'
To be precise, it looked like Veronica was the one unilaterally pushing Ha-rin away.
Not hard to understand.
I'd spent years tormented by deep inferiority from my loss to Baek Chan, replaying it in dreams.
Veronica, born with talent on par with Baek Chan, was a genius who could look down on most of Korean Martial Arts Genius Academy's latecomers. But even her brilliance paled before the monster that was Ha-rin.
Unlike me, who saw Ha-rin as some ethereal being above the clouds—no real inferiority complex—Veronica might've felt Ha-rin as a tantalizing mirage, or a peak visible yet impossible to climb.
When feelings like inferiority, jealousy, envy, frustration fester inside... they become heart demons. Unconquered heart demons pile up... and eventually devour the mind.
Maybe that's why Veronica became the Blood Lion Demon Queen.
In her final moments, Ha-rin shoved a Return Bead down my throat and uttered the word "deal."
And I'm a vagabond who lives on reputation, a denizen of the jianghu who stakes his life on favors and grudges.
If I've taken upfront payment for a commission, I see it through no matter what.
Even if the whole world except me—including the client—forgets it ever happened.
Foolish, some might say. Can't be helped.
This goes beyond mere conscience or conviction; it's directly tied to the inaction—my martial feats—I've built up.
But as they say, how do you even know or fulfill a commission the client herself has forgotten? That was my biggest hurdle.
'The longer the detour, the better. If even Ha-rin doesn't know about it.'
Probing her surroundings could work.
First name that comes to mind for Ha-rin's circle: her grandfather, Son Dae-geon. And the Wind Moon Sect disciples under him count too.
To martial artists from proper sects, fellow disciples and seniors are as close as blood kin.
But Wind Moon Sect's headquarters is 500km north on Baekdu Mountain—the entire vast range basically the domain of an EX Rank master like Wind Duke.
Doubt I, with nothing but sword skills, could do anything better for Wind Moon disciples than their own sect leader.
Excluding disciples, Ha-rin's remaining circle narrows to friends... including Veronica. For a young lady from a famed sect like Ha-rin, she'd have grown up playing with Murim kids her age, who all ended up enrolling at Korean Martial Arts Genius Academy.
The conclusion after piecing it together was crystal clear.
'Gotta go to school.'
Hours of scouring the gallery, old blue armband habits kicking in to nuke gross pics... before I knew it, dawn was breaking outside the window.
Another morning dawning, familiar now in this regressed life.